Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Sharon Van Etten: "Your Love Is Killing Me" |  |
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Posted: 14 May 2014 08:26 AM PDT
What are you supposed to do with a song like this? You can't gaze directly at it. You certainly can't cook dinner to it. How do you interact with it? You have to shut the door, close the browser window, stare at your hands. Sharon Van Etten sings like someone throwing a dirt clod in your face, and on "Your Love Is Killing Me", she performs violence on your ability to maintain composure. The song title is the sentiment: "Break my leg so I can't walk to you/ Cut my tongue so I can't talk to you/ Burn my skin so I can't feel you/ Stab my eyes so I can't see." It is about as understated and shaded as an I-Beam to the face.
On "Your Love is Killing Me", her singing is so tremendously powerful it trembles at the edge of intelligibility. Listen to the way she sings "Your love is killing me"—almost all of the hard consonants disappear from the words, and they become a howl. It is, frankly, knee-buckling. The ability of a human voice to induce this weakness is one of the most profound and mysterious things music can do. When it happens, you go quiet, just for a moment. After it's over, the machines start whirring again as you attempt to explain to yourself where your faculties just went.  |
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